[linux-audio-user] mixdown, ardour + soft synths

[Thorsten Wilms]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 12:08:29PM +0200, Atte André Jensen wrote:
> 
> Say I wrote a song with sounds coming from zyn/specimen and cue 
> vocal/acoustic guitar coming from ardour. I generate two .wav's of my 
> song, one with and one without my cue vocal. I send the files to a real 
> singer, who imports the non-vocal-infected version in cubase, records 
> her vocals (one mono track) and sends the new vocal-only file to me. I 
> import the file in ardour and now without any tweaking the vocal should 
> line up (time wise) with the music "in sync".

Easy. Use Ardour, always record from song start (or from specific 
points in time, like at 2 minutes or bar 45). Same for every DAW / 
audio sequencer.

 
> >how about recording to single tracks in Ardour and mixdown from there?
> 
> You mean recording all my soft synths into ardour and doing a mixdown there?
> 
> First it's a bit cumbersome to record the synths, and this would only 
> serve the purpose of the mixdown, since I really like having the synths 
> running along in realtime so that they can be modified at all times 
> during the process.

With single outputs from the softsynths it wouldn't be. But with 
Zyn and Specimen in your list ... Connecting them all to a single 
Ardour track is no more work than to mhwaveedit, I suppose.


> Secondly I'm actually not sure exactly how to mixdown a project to a 
> stereo track in ardour. Would I have to create a stereo track, connect 
> all tracks output to the new tracks ins, press record and let the entire 
> project play/record in realtime? I was hoping for an "offline" mixdown 
> so that I don't have to 1) connect and 2) wait for 5 mins (provided the 
> song is 5 mins)...

Only tried that once and not recently, from what I recall, you just 
need to set range markers for the lenght you want to export, and 
Session -> Export (whatever it's called exactly). Pretty sure it 
does freewheeling.


> >But consider using wavpack for not having to change bit depth.
> 
> I never heard about that before, looks promising. Will try it out to see 
> if my windows friends can figure out how to use it. Regarding bit depth, 
> I'm not even sure what bit depth/sample rate they use...
> 
> How much compression can be expected with wavpack?

Don't know, it justs seems to be the only option for truly losless jack 
audio compression.

AFAIR, Cubase stores PCM, 44100 (by default, at least).
Conversions are bad for quality and are a little file  management 
nightmare, so better use same SR from start.


--
Thorsten Wilms